From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon 03 Mar 2003 - 15:44:21 GMT
>> If you reproduced one of the artifacts
left by an Indian tribe to the degree that it couldn't be distinguished from
the original, wouldn't you have received the information contained in the
making of it?
>No. Please explain how I could? Xerox is not culture.
I didn't see where anybody claimed that it was. On the other hand, xerox is
an intimate part of modern culture.
But if you were talking about an artifact such as a clay bowl or a stone ax
head, for example, and you went out and gathered the same kind of clay and
formed that clay in the same way and decorated it with the same designs and
fired it at the same temperature, you would have learned a thing or two
about how the tribe accomplished the task themselves.
There are anthropologists today who study the art of working stone to
produce the same artifacts they find in the earth in order to understand the
culture that produced them. I guess you would say they are wasting their
time and aren't likely to learn anything about that culture.
As you might guess, I disagree
Grant
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